ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argues that a postcolonial critique of poststructuralist reformulations of humanist thought has important implications for the analytical, political, and existential domains of human judgment. Poststructuralist critical intervention into humanism can be understood in terms of the question of the human or man as the willed social actor—the human, or within a Foucauldian critical terrain, "Man"—who is the authorial origin of consciousness understood as speech. The problem of agency has been felt and articulated within feminist poststructuralism. While Alcoff addresses and resolves the problem of agency in explicitly stated metaphysical or ontological and performative terms through the position of positionality, Weedon addresses the political and emotional stakes of theorizing agency in terms of a similar notion of feminist agency as a choice among competing subject-positions. However poststructuralist theory warns against a reductive humanist notion of accountability, one where individuals are judged for "their" choices, actions, and emotions.
